As for search terms numbers, I’m again looking at Technorati’s data:
http://searchanalytics.compete.com/site_referrals/technorati.com

Are “cialis” and “beastiality” and “phentermine” keywords really used more than search terms with words like “blog” or “search engine” in them? I suppose, doing searches with those queries on Google, I see Technorati is #2 for the search term “cialis”. Amazing.

Again, thank you for the clarification!

Specifically focusing on the Technorati example, I believe you were a bit confused about the “average monthly search referral” column data. This is actually total monthly referrals for the SITE not for a specific keyword. As a result , the 21M number you came up with is actually 798,000.

In reference to your last comment, we are not claiming that only 8000 terms were used by people to get to Technorati. What that data point means is that Compete actually sees 8000 unique terms. As a panel based measurement company, we are not going to see every search term driving traffic to a site, but instead get a great cross section of search behavior. Search is an extremely long-tail activity, and we don’t expect to see every term driving traffic to a site.

If you have more questions, feel free to email me (mfreiert@compete.com)

Note this in the Overview box:

Domain / Category technorati.com
Time frame 2007-11-29 to 2008-02-27
Available results 7,945 terms

Is this saying that, in the last month, 7,945 distinct terms (search queries, really, right?) were used by people who went to technorati.com after doing a search (on google, yahoo, ask, live…)?

If my interpretation is correct, then isn’t this number *way* *way* *way* too low? I looked at a few other domains and the numbers looked way too low, too. Am I not interpreting these numbers correctly?

Thanks.

Compete shows almost 21M monthly *search referrals.*
Quantcast shows 13-14M monthly *PVs*. (i.e. not *just* search referrals)

This makes Compete SA numbers even more off (not all PVs are search referrals - only the initial PV that lead the searcher to a site from a search engine is counted as a search referral, I presume).

Big note: this is not a Compete SA vs. Quantcast comparison. I am using Quantcast here only because in this case Quantcast gives the actual traffic numbers (i.e. not estimated), because Technorati happens to have the little Quantcast beacon.

For instance, look at keyword “simpy”:
http://searchanalytics.compete.com/keyword_destination/simpy

This gives 14,879 avg. monthly search referrals for simpy.com domain.
I run simpy.com and I’m looking at its referral stats right now and see that this number is about an order of magnitude off the actual number.

Here is another one. Technorati happens to be Quantified Publisher:
http://www.quantcast.com/technorati.com
From that we can see TR gets 13-14 monthly PVs.

But this is what Compete SA gives:
http://searchanalytics.compete.com/keyword_destination/technorati
Keyword “technorati” is 3.71% of its search referrals, that being 797,969 avg. monthly search referrals.
100 / 3.71 = about 26

Thus, the total number of search referrals is 798,000 * 26 = 20,748,000

So this is saying TR gets almost 21M PVs from search referrals alone. But in fact, since Quantcast measures TR traffic directly (i.e. no estimates, that *is* the real traffic), we can see that the PVs are at 13-14M, which means Compete SA numbers are about 50% off!

Can someone from Compete comment on this? Am I making some wrong assumptions anywhere?
I like the service, I like the numbers, but if they are indeed as off as these two examples show, then…